Sorry for that long precursor to my birth much less my story, but to understand what kind of a family I come from one should know where my family is coming from. I grew up in a homeschooled house, my oldest sister L went to a public school, but until Jr. High my middle sister J and I both were homeschooled. Our textbooks were from a Christian provider, and taught us things about how Pocahontas was lucky because we brought her to God, and we learned our Language Arts lessons with Biblical scriptures. The first public activity, outside of Church that I was exposed to was a Bible Study type group called AWANA, a country-wide organization that separates children into their school grades and gives them books with verses in them to be memories, readings to study with questions to answer. There was a portion of the evening when a Leader would give the kids a Bible lesson, a portion where the kids would repeat their memorized verses to their Leaders, and a portion of games. I started in the Preschool grade and went all the way through the High School grades, memorizing over 1000 Bible verses. (Possibly more, what with 69 verses in the first three years alone, and 150 in the following four years.) I was and still am very proud of my achievements in AWANA. Not every pagan can say they have a grasp of the Bible, much less have so many verses logged in random areas of their brainmatters. And aside from the verses I have memorized I was also to become familiar with many aspects of the Bible through church, and personal reading. While I have not read the entire Old and New Testament cover to cover I have read many of the books within start to finish. I have a pretty good grasp of my Biblical knowledge, and still keep a Bible on my bookshelf, in part to remind me of my start, and in part so I can pull it out whenever a Christian decides to challenge my learning.

I spent a lot of time searching for Faith between the leather covers of a book. But I was to find Faith from a very different book, or rather several books.In the early years of my life I learned to read from Biblical stories written for children, or from morality stories written with a heavy Christian undertone (Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories for example)(Yes I'm only in my 20s, my parents liked those books). My sisters favorite series was the "Little House on the Prairie" books, by Laura Ingles Wilder, I loved them because the main character was also a little girl named Laura. Again, heavy Christian undertones. By my dad really brought it all together by reading "Little Pilgrim's Progress" which was a child-friendly adaptation of the John Bunyan "Pilgrim's Progress." (It was heavily edited because not even everything in that book was Christian enough). It is an allegorical bildingsroman (coming of age novel) about a young man who battles his vices, carries his cross, and is eventually saved by a "Prince" who shows him the path of safety (but if I remember correctly only shows up after a near-death experience).But ironically I think it was that book that lead me to seek more books with a fantastical theme. Of course, even in a Christian household as mine fairy tales could not be entirely kept out. My dad was a huge fan of some of the original Walt Disney films, so I grew up with Snow White and Cinderella movies, sometimes those and the Looney Toons on film that we had were the only thing I would ever watch, as my parents couldn't always afford cable. The stories of princesses, and magic, and fairy godparents thrilled me. At the library I would pick up the picture books about the fairy tales. And a little later I would start picking up longer books, always reading the back and if it had a magical tone it was more likely to go in my bag than say, the next Boxcar Children's book. But there are two books in my youth that stand out as the ones that really had my ready to believe in fairies. But neither of them were to come into my life until the year I spent in a very small private school.